Laura Bates

Girls are not only being denied access to scientific and adventurous toys, they're also presented with such a narrow range of options that domesticity and stereotypically "female" duties are shoved down their throats before they've even reached the age of five.

Sexism is often an invisible problem. This is partly because it's so frequently manifest in situations where the only witnesses present are victim and perpetrator.

Disbelief is the first great silencer.

Our experiences of all forms of gender prejudice - from daily sexism to distressing harassment to sexual violence - are part of a continuum that impacts all of us, all the time, shaping ourselves, and our ideas about the world. To include stories of assault and rape within a project documenting everyday experiences of gender imbalance is simply to extend its boundaries to the most extreme manifestations of that prejudice. To see how great the damage can become when the minor, "unimportant" issues are allowed to pass without comment. To prove how the steady drip-drip-drip of sexism and sexualization and objectification is connected to the assumption of ownership and control over women's bodies, and how the background noise of harassment and disrespect connects to the assertion of power that is violence and rape.

One of the cleverest and most insidious twists in the whole sorry tale is the way women are double bound by a gender-biased definition of professionalism and the threat of being labeled "whining.

Women are silenced by both the invisibility and the acceptability of the problem.

I quickly learned, however, that a university education is not a prerequisite to reading Shakespeare. After all, his original audience was not college-educated. Neither was he.